Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) is broadly used for the simulation of aeroacoustics problems. This time-domain CFD/CAA approach is transient, explicit and compressible and offers an accurate and efficient solution to simultaneously resolve turbulent flows and their corresponding flow-induced noise radiation. Some examples of applications are ground transportation wind-noise problems, buffeting, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), fan noise, etc. As shown in previous studies, LBM can also be used to accurately handle linear acoustics problems if the source of noise is not a flow but a simple acoustic source. This set of capabilities makes LBM a suitable candidate for evaluating the acoustics performances of exhaust systems and mufflers.
Compared to other traditional acoustics methods, LBM presents the advantage to skip tedious volume meshing operations since the mesh generation is fully automatic. Furthermore, considering that all geometrical details are included in the simulation domain and that LBM is explicit, high frequencies mechanisms up to 10–20 kHz can be captured. The upper frequency limit is indeed solely driven by the spatial resolution used to discretize the system.
In this paper, three academic 3-D geometries representative of production muffler systems are studied. Transmission Loss (TL) measurements are performed on three configurations and these experiments are reproduced numerically with LBM.
The experimental setup is described in a first part and the numerical details are given in a second part and third part. In particular, the method used to calculate the TL in the simulation and the convergence of the results with respect to the spatial resolution are shown. In a third part, the simulations are compared to the TL measurements and a numerical investigation of the effect of geometry details on the simulated results is proposed. This study highlights the sensitivity of acoustics measurements to geometry details.
Wind noise spectra in small Reynolds number turbulent flows
